Ultra-Orthodox Jews are stoning buses because “BAWWWW men and women should be separate because men cannot keep their penises in their pants BAWWWW!”

In the view of some ultra-Orthodox Jews, segregated seating, with women entering separately through the rear door and sitting at the back, is vital to uphold their stringent traditions stipulating modesty and prohibiting physical contact with members of the opposite sex.

Reminded of something, folks?

MenachemKenig, head of a committee pressing for segregated buses, says Israel’s leading bus company, Egged, is in effect forcing religious people to sin. “The one place where men and women are forced to be together is on the bus,” he says. “People are crowded in, men and women push up against each other. There are sudden stops and sharp turns and men fall on the women. This really angers us, it is a violation of the concept of modesty that is at the basis of the ultra-orthodox community.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Excuse me while I stop laug–HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Truly epic lulz, theistards. If the bus drivers are really driving so fast that people are falling on each other in the bus, men and women sitting together would be the least of your concerns.

I think somebody just needs to get laid.

But Laura Wharton, a secularist member of the Jerusalem city council, says the attempt to force a new segregated bus line is “outrageous and extremist”, adding: “It is humiliating to be sent to the back of the bus.”

No shit, Sherlock. Maybe you should spend more time shouting down your Orthodox coreligionists and fighting over the correct interpretation of your holy book? Just saying.

A MeaShearim store-owner said: “According to the Jewish religion, it is forbidden to damage property. These people are causing shame to the ultra-Orthodox community, which is made up of very delicate people. It is true that Egged does not give good service to the ultra-Orthodox but you don’t solve this through ugly violence.”

Translation: They are not true Jews! They are making us look bad HURRDURR! I am a true Jew and I know what god wants! BAWWWWWW!

The theistards involved may be different, but the sort of lunacy we have come to expect from the fundies often stays the same. It is made of BAWWWWW and fail for them, and epic lulz for our side.

WESTON, Wis. — Kara Neumann, 11, had grown so weak that she could not walk or speak. Her parents, who believe that God alone has the ability to heal the sick, prayed for her recovery but did not take her to a doctor.

After an aunt from California called the sheriff’s department here, frantically pleading that the sick child be rescued, an ambulance arrived at the Neumann’s rural home on the outskirts of Wausau and rushed Kara to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival.

The county coroner ruled that she had died from diabetic ketoacidosis resulting from undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes. The condition occurs when the body fails to produce insulin, which leads to severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function.

About a month after Kara’s death last March, the Marathon County state attorney, Jill Falstad, brought charges of reckless endangerment against her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann. Despite the Neumanns’ claim that the charges violated their constitutional right to religious freedom, Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court ordered Ms. Neumann to stand trial on May 14, and Mr. Neumann on June 23. If convicted, each faces up to 25 years in prison.

“The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “but not necessarily conduct.”

If you are familiar at all with the usual arguments of religious kooks, you would be well versed with the way they BAWWWWW about how religion brings families together, helps people be moral, yada yada yada.

This article shows another side of religion that the theistards don’t like to mention.

tl:dr: A Hindu priest rapes a woman, is arrested, and confessed to the crime. The woman’s son refuses to believe that the priest did it (because men of god don’t do bad things ever, amirite?), and now refuses to visit his mother in hospital.

This is utterly despicable, not only on the part of the so-called holy man who used his position to commit monstrous crimes; but also on the part of people who are so deluded religious leaders that they would rather be split from their families than believe that a man of god could have done something wrong.

When religion is concerned, it seems that everything suddenly becomes AWWRIGHT. Children dying because their parents refuse medical care – it’s AWWRIGHT! Families split because of religion – it’s AWWRIGHT! Science education fucked up because of religion – it’s AWWRIGHT!

[appeaser-speak]What makes it AWWRIGHT, you ask? Why, because it is religion, of course! Religion should not be criticized because it is RELIGION, dammit, and we need to show some respect here. Respect religion because it is religion! Don’t you see the logic here?[/appeaser speak]

See the problem with that approach, folks? When situations such as the above happen, most appeasers are quick to denounce the practice as ‘extremism’ and the like, without realizing that their actions then make them exactly like the so-called ‘militant atheists’ they abhor…because, we all know that speaking out against religion makes us militants.

Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl’s condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.

His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose.

This is sad, but final…except for one little problem. The boy’s family belong to a sect of Hasidic Jews who cling to an archaic belief that life is determined by the presence of a beating heart, and this particular body is hooked up to drugs and machines that keep the tissue flailing away futilely, and so the parents are taking the hospital to court to keep prodding the corpse into this semblance of life.

Mary is a pretty five-year-old girl with big brown eyes and a father who kicked her out onto the streets in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. Her crime: the local priest had denounced her as a witch and blamed her “evil powers” for causing her mother’s death.

Mary was found by a British charity worker and today lives at a refuge in Akwa Ibom province with 150 other children who have been branded witches, blamed for all their family’s woes, and abandoned. Before being pushed out of their homes many were beaten or slashed with knives, thrown onto fires, or had acid poured over them as a punishment or in an attempt to make them “confess” to being possessed. In one horrific case, a young girl called Uma had a three-inch nail driven into her skull.

Yet Mary and the others at the shelter are the lucky ones for they, at least, are alive. Many of those branded “child-witches” are murdered – hacked to death with machetes, poisoned, drowned, or buried alive in an attempt to drive Satan out of their soul.

After being inspected, probably in the nude, by a cabal of elderly religious judges for bodily imperfections, she was then taken to her final test: a night in a room filled with the severed heads of farm animals. Really. If she showed any fear, she would be dumped back with her family. But, she didn’t, and she now gets to live a life of complete seclusion in a temple, with no contact with her family, being adored by the devout. This will go on until she hits puberty, at which point she will be unceremoniously deposed by another lucky young Shakya and will spend the rest of her life in probable poverty and cursed with a superstition that keeps bachelors from seeking the hand of young ex-goddesses.

The growth of Islamism was first noted by the West with a mixture of indifference and incredulity. Had not the Islamic world always thrown up occasional figures such as the Mad Mahdi in Sudan, whose followers murdered General Gordon of Khartoum in 1885?

Then they always faded away and the Muslim world resumed its peaceful, sleepy existence.

That was the romantic idea. But ever since the West linked itself to dependence upon oil, and ever since large numbers of poor Muslims from the former Pakistan and elsewhere migrated here, it had not been a very realistic one. How unrealistic became clear on September 11, 2001, when Islamist suicide-murderers crashed hijacked planes into the Twin Towers.

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